Ghost of master spy Kim Philby returns to Cambridge

This weekend, an audience of academics, laymen and intelligence officers will
gather at Trinity College to listen to Kim Philby lecture on the art of
betrayal

In a recorded address to an audience of KGB officers, Philby, a long-term Soviet mole at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, instructs them on how to handle agents in the fieldPhoto: PA

Neil Tweedie

9:00AM BST 25 Apr 2014

Give me the child and I’ll give you the man, said the Jesuits. The KGB, on the other hand, believed that indoctrination could wait until a little later in life. But there was no disagreement between the two regarding the best place to recruit spies. From the time of Elizabeth I, when Roman Catholic zealots plotted the Protestant queen’s downfall, to the 1930s, when it incubated the so-called Magnificent Five of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross, the University of Cambridge has been a breeding ground for treason and espionage.

This weekend, that tradition will be celebrated – if that is the right word – at the first-ever conference on the Cambridge Spies to be held in Cambridge. An audience of academics, laymen and intelligence officers will gather at Trinity College, which produced four of the five, to listen to Kim Philby lecture on the art of betrayal.

The most notorious traitor produced by Britain in the 20th century will speak from beyond the grave on a tape smuggled out of Russia to the West. In a recorded address to an audience of KGB officers, Philby, a long-term Soviet mole at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, instructs them in how to handle agents in the field. Speaking through an interpreter, the man who sent hundreds of agents to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain, even manages a joke or two.

“The most important thing the tape does is to provide a possible answer to the biggest unanswered question about Philby’s exile in Russia,” says Professor Christopher Andrew, Britain’s leading historian on intelligence and a keynote speaker at the conference. “Here is this man, a super hero, who even has his face on Soviet postage stamps, and yet he is denied the supreme honour of Hero of the Soviet Union, an award bestowed on KGB agents of much lesser significance. Why?”

Guy Burgess, like Philby, Blunt and Cairncross an alumnus of Trinity, will also speak from the other side. He features in a recording made shortly before his defection to the Soviet Union with Donald Maclean (a Trinity Hall man)in 1951, a rambling account of a meeting with Winston Churchill during the Munich Crisis of 1938.

“Here, we have the opportunity to 'repatriate’ the voice of Kim Philby, Britain’s most famous Soviet spy, for the first time in 80 years,” says Daniel Larson, a fellow of Trinity specialising in the secret world.

Intelligence has been attracting intelligence since the 16th century when secret protectors and enemies of the Elizabethan regime were nurtured by the banks of the Cam. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, was a graduate of King’s College, while his principal code-breaker, Thomas Phelippes, was a Trinity man. Phelippes played a prominent role in the unmasking of the Babington Plot, a conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. Phelippes’ success in breaking enciphered letters implicating Mary in the plot resulted in her execution.

Cambridge was also a nursery for treason. Moles are nothing new, as shown by a letter written in 1581 by Robert Persons, a Catholic cleric, to the head of the Jesuit order.

“At Cambridge I have insinuated a certain priest into the very university, under the guise of scholar or gentleman commoner,” he wrote. The undercover priest was a successful recruiter, a satisfied Father Persons remarking that: “Within a few months he has sent over to Rheims seven very fit youths.” The seminary at Rheims trained English priests prepared to risk all to achieve the deliverance of England from Protestantism.

“In the 1580s both sides were recruiting at Cambridge,” says Prof Andrew. “But in the 1930s only the Russians were recruiting. MI5, the domestic Security Service, recruited not a single person from the university in that decade. MI6, meanwhile, had yet to develop a talent-spotting system at the ancient universities.”

The idea of recruiting agents at Cambridge and Oxford was largely that of Arnold Deutsch, a Viennese psychologist of Jewish extraction, and one of the most successful recruiters ever employed by Soviet intelligence.

“Deutsch has one of those brilliant ideas that is obvious when you point it out but not obvious until you do,” says Prof Andrew. “Previously, within Britain, Soviet recruitment has focused on the working class movement because this is where you find most of your natural sympathisers. Then old Deutsch says, 'Look, we want to recruit people who will end up in positions at the top of government, so why not do it the easy way and recruit at Oxford and Cambridge, where most of the permanent secretaries and senior diplomats obtain their degrees?’

“He then makes the point that an agent under investigation in later life can always dismiss Communist sympathies at university as 'just a phase’. It is extremely simple.”

Deutsch, a brilliant academic who had enrolled on an undergraduate course at London University, recruited Philby in April 1934 as the two sat on a bench in London’s Regents Park. The young Englishman was deeply impressed by the Austrian.

“What tends to be forgotten is that people are converted to causes not by pamphlets but through the influence of others,” says Prof Andrew.

“The Five were, by the standards of the time, sexual rebels. They were very evenly balanced, two and a half each by orientation. Two were gay, Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, and no-one in Britain at that time was more uproariously gay than Burgess. Kim Philby and John Cairncross, meanwhile, were athletic hetrosexuals. Remember, this was a time when anyone caught with a member of the opposite sex in their room overnight faced the certainty of being sent down from university. Donald Maclean accounts for the statistical anomaly, being bisexual. This man Deutsch, who has spent much of his career promoting the idea that Freud and Marx can somehow be combined in one over-arching critique, explains, among other things, how fascism and sexual repression are in reality different sides of the same coin. In the entire history of the KGB I do not think it is possible to improve on Deutsch.”

But why the Cambridge Five and not the Oxford Five?

“As with so many small groups, it is of critical importance who the first member is. Philby is the first and he recommends his friend Burgess and the Maclean, who is not so much a friend but someone who impresses him. Burgess talent-spots both Blunt, his teacher, and Cairncross.”

The conference will hear from a relative of a Communist student at Cambridge who initially fired Philby’s imagination.

“One of the leading firebrands of the university socialist society, which is in fact a Communist society, is delivering a speech at Clare College and Philby is sitting at his feet, mesmerized,” recounts Prof Andrew. “And Philby says, 'I would like you to tell me how I can be of practical help to the cause’.”

In that sentence lay the beginning of a double life that would last for 30 years, until that stormy night in Beirut in January 1963 when Philby boarded a freighter bound for the spiritual home he had visited only in his dreams. Charming, an accomplished cultivator of friendships, this product of the British elite operated at the heart of the Anglo-American intelligence apparatus, blowing anti-Communist operations from the Balkans to the Caucasus while talking cricket over whiskies in the bar.

But even the ultra-cool Philby could not last forever. In 1951 he was forced to resign from MI6 under a cloud of suspicion following the defections of Burgess and Maclean. American intercepts of Soviet diplomatic traffic were about to unmask Maclean, then a senior diplomat in London, as a Soviet spy and Philby, who had learned of the breakthrough, dispatched Burgess from Washington to warn him that the net was closing in. Philby eventually found employment as a journalist in Beirut, but continued to work for MI6, which refused to acknowledge his guilt. But in 1963 Philby was confronted with fresh evidence by his friend and fellow MI6 officer, Nicholas Elliot. After fleeing to Russia Philby spent 14 years in limbo, slowly drinking himself to death in his Moscow apartment. A new wife, Rufina, saved him, together with Oleg Kalugin, a KGB general who believed that more use should be made of this most magnificent of the Five.

Hence the recorded speech, made in 1977, ten years before Philby’s death. The occasion marked the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution and lasted an hour because of the requirement for an interpreter.

“There is a slightly ironic beginning in which Philby makes a jocular reference to having visited some of world’s major intelligence headquarters and 'Now, I’m allowed to come to yours!’,” says Prof Andrew. “Then he goes on to explain what a privilege it is to be chosen to mark not only the 60th anniversary of the revolution but the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Soviet football league. Russian audiences expect Brits to be like Brits and Philby isn’t going to let his down.”

The tape was “exfiltrated” from Russia in the 1990s when for a brief time the KGB was open to approaches from western journalists and historians. It is the property of an American collector of intelligence memorabilia.

But what was it in the speech that may have blotted Philby’s copybook and denied him Hero-status?

“Philby could have chosen to speak about anything in this speech but he chooses the subject of running agents,” says Prof Andrew. “He tells his audience of KGB officers that, 'I realise you may not want to talk to your agents about what happens if they get caught because it may depress them but that possibility goes through all our minds. So the one thing you must always tell them to do is never, ever admit anything’.”

But Philby did admit something. According to leaked accounts of his meetings with Elliot in Beirut, Philby confessed to spying for the Kremlin only until 1946, claiming that he had done so solely to aid a wartime ally.

“Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Philby’s escape to Russia and it was rumoured that he would at last be made a posthumous Hero of the Russian Federation,” says Prof Andrew. “And then they didn’t do it. They just didn’t do it.

“My hypothesis is that the Russians discovered Philby had deceived them - not remotely to the degree that he deceived British intelligence - but deceived them nevertheless.”

Moscow, argues Prof Andrew, was probably unaware of the extent to which Philby had confessed his treason. The Englishman’s stressing during his recorded speech of the need for an agent to admit nothing under interrogation was in retrospect a provocation, another lie from a man wrapped in lies.

“Philby was attempting to hold the line about his treason at 1946 and it seems to have worked because the heads of both MI5 and MI6 supported that line in a joint letter to J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI,” says Andrew.

But why break his own cardinal rule?

“Philby was making really difficult decisions in between the questioning by Elliot under the influence of a very great deal of alcohol,” says the historian. “I think he had become completely incompetent by that point.

“Imagine: time after time as a senior MI6 officer he has come across leaks from Soviet sources of one kind of another that might betray him at any moment. Nobody can reconstruct what was going on in his head.

“In the end, there are only two hypotheses: one that the Russians never intended to make him a Hero in the way they had for lesser people; the other is that they did intend to confer that honour but changed their minds. They probably caught up with the lie on the tape. Heroes of the Russian Federation do not do such things.”

The conference is primarily about the shadow history of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire but mention will be made also of the Soviet intelligence operation at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Svetlana Lokhova, a Russian researcher working with Prof Andrew, will disclose in public for the first time the extent of KGB recruitment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other American universities. Technical information was the main target in regard to the United States.

“Recruitment began at MIT several years before it started at Cambridge,” says Miss Lokhova. “The leading Soviet penetration agent at MIT, whose identity will be revealed for the first time, was later sentenced to death for attempting to kill Stalin.”

Philby, that most accomplished of spies, suffered throughout his life from a stammer. He could control it, usually, but there is one time during the speech when gives way to his impediment. It is when he mentions the name “B–B-Burgess”. Guy, the outrageous Guy, was like Philby a drunkard, who had, against his will, been forced to opt for a new life in an alien society. It was Philby who had given his friend the task of spiriting Maclean out of Britain, forcing him to endure the reality of Mother Russia’s socialist paradise. Burgess, forever condemned to be an Englishman abroad, had escaped suspicion right until the end of his clandestine career, despite his supposed tendency to indiscretion. Aimless and alone, but for a KGB-supplied boyfriend, he drank himself to death in 1963, seven months after Philby’s arrival in Moscow.

When Philby wrote his autobiography, My Silent War, he chose his former MI6 colleague, the novelist Graham Greene, to pen the introduction. Greene, the tortured Catholic convert, drew comparison between the Cambridge Catholics who had supported Philip of Spain and the Cambridge Communists who had supported Stalin. Both had laid claim to a higher loyalty than mere patriotism.

“Cambridge is a place of innovation but also of deep tradition,” says Christian Bak, a researcher in intelligence at Christ’s College and one of the organisers of the conference. “And in one sense its deepest tradition is that which lies within the shadows, that of the spy.”

There is still much to learn from the era of Cold War espionage. For example, Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, ran its own networks in the west and has revealed little of its activities. Maybe there are still things to learn, even now, about Harold Adrian Russell 'Kim’ Philby.

That notorious traitor may never be made a posthumous Hero of the land he served but there is now a plaque to him, pinned to the wall of the headquarters of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence agency, which succeeded the KGB. It contains two profiles of Philby, staring towards each other, as if through a mirror. Two-faced, just like the man.